Take that you bitch”.
These are the first words that I had ever heard from the lady from Room 8B. We had passed many times before on the way to the dining hall but never spoke. Her name was Mary Morgan and she came with a reputation.
I lived in Room 8F and had to pass her door at least three times a day. Today was different. She was bent over the bed of Enid in Room 8D. The door was slightly open as I passed and as I stared into the room Mary span round quickly and said “What the fuck are you looking at?” As I have mentioned earlier Mary came with a reputation. As a 76 year old lady this was some reputation. She pointed at a chair in the room and said “Sit there and keep quiet” I did as I was told.
Mary turned back towards the bed and I noticed that she was trying to put an earring into Enid’s ear. The other thing that struck me was that there was a syringe on the bed.
Mary turned to me again and said “If you don’t want to end up like this you need to keep your mouth shut and say nothing”
Enid looked as though she wouldn’t be joining us for dinner later.
I was told that Mary would come and see me later in my room after dinner.
To give you a little more information Mary was a lady who had lived a tough life.Three marriages and six children and a liking for alcohol and drugs. She had outlived two of her husbands and three of her children. Each relationship had been abusive and she had served time at her majesty’s pleasure for drug dealing. Mary had never worked for a living but she had worked harder than most to keep living.
My name is Stephen Bell and my circumstances are different from Mary’s although the one thing we have in common is that we were both sad and unhappy people.
I was a barrister, married to a fine lady who was my first love. We didn’t have children but enjoyed the lifestyle that both of our salaries could easily afford. Unfortunately I had an affair with a much younger secretary who became pregnant and in turn my life changed forever.
My new wife was very demanding and the three children that we raised wanted for nothing. It was when I reached my Sixtieth birthday that I noticed I was forgetting more than I was remembering. With two children still at university I couldn’t afford to retire and carried on in my profession.
There are now people suffering in prison for my inadequacies in the courtroom which is haunt me when I try to sleep. I assume there are many more people in a similar positions to myself.
My second family wanted me to keep on practising and to keep them in the same financial circumstances to which they had been accustomed to. When they finally realised this wasn’t going to be possible the last thing they wanted was to spend their inheritance money on care home fees. Instead they hired a home help lady from an agency who would visit me three days a week, while my family ignored me and continued on with their own lives.
I wasn’t totally dependent on June who was my lovely care lady but I certainly was unhappy with the way my family were treating me. I made a call to a friend who was a doctor and exaggerated my condition in such a way that he recommended that I should be placed in care. This meant leaving my old victorian house with the knowledge that my assets would be spent on my own care and not on others.
Mary walked straight into Room 8F after dinner without knocking. She said “There’s a doctor at Enid’s and no doubt the doctor will be signing a death certificate and the certificate will state Natural Causes”. Although the way she died certainly wasn’t natural.
I asked “did you kill her?”
“Of course I did, nobody pushes in front of me in the dinner queue” said Mary who then started to laugh.I felt the need to get out of the room and stood up as quick as I could.Mary got to the door before me and raised her hand up and placed it on my chest. “Enid was a killer, she murdered her husband and two children and Enid has now paid for her sins. In her other hand Mary had a newspaper which she handed to me. There were pictures of Enid. One from the 70’s and one from 2004. The first described a very disturbing court case. The second was from a local paper where residents from an estate had complained about a killer being released and housed locally. The picture was grainy but I was on no doubt that this was Enid.
Mary stared directly into my eyes and said “ are you with me” ? If you are with me, then we have work to do. If you have a problem then I need to know.
In 2 years time Mary would die through national causes and I wouldn’t be far behind. In this short space of time we would both be responsible for another four deaths. The deaths of people who deserved to die but which gave me and Mary a reason to keep living for as long as possible.
If you want to know how these people died then I would take you back to the first murder scene at Room 8D.
As a teenager Mary was responsible for selling drugs to many people to allow her to look after her own children even though two of her own children had later died from a drug overdose.
She became clean while in prison but thought that she was going to hell anyway. For Mary this was a way of contrition.
Mary would save her own medication for a week and make a solution.She would put the solution into a syringe and visit her target. She would wait until the person was asleep and remove their earring and inject the solution into the cavity and then replace the earring.
It would be the case that most doctors wouldn’t spend too much time considering the cause and death of a person at a care home.
Foot Note.
Although abused by men for most of her life the other cases we would investigate were all women.
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Anthony Cooney Visit @TnGTheBand on twitter. 